Two men in me,
in the smoke
prowls a fearful man
who goes by another name, has another soul
with another mind—
what I feel he denies,
what I dream he undreams,
what I hope he despairs,
and what I love he despises—
split
every healing I experience
he infects with an addiction,
torments me with fears,
intimately loves then rejects me,
certain of my love, then disorientated,
I want it, he resists it,
suspended between commitment and promiscuity.
I need the river,
I need to run by the water,
it bends and blends me
into the darkness of black crow feathers,
where I listen to stones speak of our inseparable spirits.
I need to be by the river
where I can dream of being
hundreds of miles away,
toting my rucksack,
hiking sage trails,
across rocky slopes
in boots,
green cap, beige pants, blue sports t-top and red pullover.
My love for the river is rooted in what’s fallen and what’s transformed.
Seasons survive
beneath leaf-skin
where I cocoon my memories,
and am released a moth
in the afternoon
to float by a honeysuckle vine strung along the river trees.
The river and I see through each other’s skin,
behind the eyes into the tunnels of water-bone and rushing marrow
into an even wider sky than ours
a larger earth than where I run,
a broader river than where I pray.
(Text of the poem translated into Spanish)
“I’ve got two sports coats, about six ties, three dressy pants, Florsheims I polish a la madre, and three weeks ago I bought a suit, with silk lining, at Lemonde for Men. It came with a matching vest. That’s what made it for me. I love getting all duded up, looking fine, I really do. This is the thing: I like women. No, wait. I love women. I know that don’t sound like anything new, nothing every guy wouldn’t tell you. I mean it though, and it’s that I can’t say so better. It’s not like I do anything different when I’m around them. I’m not like aggressive, going after them, hustling. I don’t play that. I don’t do anything except have a weakness for them. I don’t ask anybody out. I already have my girlfriend Diana. Still, it’s like I feel drunk around them. Like they make me so pedo I can’t move away. See what I’m saying? So yeah, of course I love working nights at The Broadway. Women’s perfume is everywhere, and I’m dizzy while I’m there.”
Great collection of stories by Dagoberto Gilb. Click on image for more.
From within the Heavens
by Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin
(translated by Miguel León-Portilla)
From within the heavens they come,
the beautiful flowers, the beautiful songs,
but our yearning spoils them,
our inventiveness makes them lose their fragrance,
although not those of the Chichimec prince Tecayehuatzin.
With his, rejoice!
Friendship is a shower of precious flowers
White tufts of heron feathers
are woven with precious red flowers,
among the branches of the trees
under which stroll and sip
the lords and nobles
read more…
Aztlan Libre Press is extending the submission deadline for poetry in espanol/nahuatl and english to January 15, 2010. If you’re still interested in submitting, here’s your chance. We look forward to reading your work.
Read new work by Ray Gonzalez at Cerise Press, an international online journal of literature, arts, and culture. Retrieval and Six Rising Prose Poems are published in the Fall / Winter 2009-10 issue. Check it out.
“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”
Best known for co-editing, with Gloria Anzaldúa, the anthology of feminist thought This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Along with Ana Castillo and Norma Alarcon, she adapted this anthology into the Spanish-language Esta puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos. Writings in the anthology, along with works by other prominent feminists of color, call for a greater prominence within feminism for race-related subjectivities, and ultimately laid the foundation for third wave feminism or Third World Feminism in the USA. Her first sole-authored book, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (1983), a combination of autobiographically modulated prose and poetry, is also an influential critical work among Chicana feminists and other feminists of color, and among scholars working in Chicano Studies.
Cherrie Moraga was named a 2007 USA Rockefeller Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America’s top living artists.
visit cherriemoraga.com
Ajua, mis cabrones cuatachones, con/sapos y cangrejos y notas hechizeras en momentos pendejos, ca-ta-túm, ca-túm-ba, ca-túm!poetry/stories vignettes/articles/ notes on the human condition of Chicanos & pícaros, words & hopes within soulmind....
© Copyright 1976 by Ricardo SánchezHECHIZOSPELLS
APRIL 11, 1974 ... el chuco, tejasHechizos: Pieces of lifeHechizos, made or done on purpose or enchantments/ fascinations, are the
pieces of life-the hectic skits of action-that everyone must grapple with
in order to live and define the world, only to realize that the life process
is one of continual re-definition/reflection/action. Beyond the circuity of
pseudotheosophical/metaphysical circumlocutions, away from artifice and social
approval, and far from plotted out venues for aggrandizement-we live
in our inner spaces, splicing together hurt and realization, hope and
apprehensive aspiration, frustration and self-negation and love and human affirmation."Shakespeare," so Mero Galicia is fond of saying, "asked merely about being or not being
. . . " and as Mero's eyes light up, "Cervantes, he stated that 'to dream is to be!' "So it is with people becoming aware of themselves as vital/living human beings. No
longer content to work humdrum hours/days/weeks/months/years/decades out of their
preciousand-time-limited lives away just for the sake of owning a
dizzy array of instruments/cars/plastic ornaments-people beginning to seek answers within
their own dialogical frame of reference. Dreaming people seeking an end to their human
diáspora, at long last beginning to end their fruitless escapes from their life process,
beginning to affirm that to be human is to act humanely, to think/ feel their
rootedness to earth, to other human beings.
In that spirit of roots/permanence does the searing/howling cry of human
indignation arise from the poetry of poets who have lived affirmatively. Poets like
Raúl Salinas, José Montoya, Abelardo Delgado, Meredith Anderson, Juan Contreras,
E. Antonio Mares, Omar Salinas, Charles Potts, Horacio "Chacho" Minjarez, Randall
Ukrainian Ackley, Simón Ortiz, Leslie Silko, Jesfis Papalote Meléndez, Sandra Esteves,
Juan Bruce-Novoa, Sylvia Gonzáles, Tigre, Len Avila, and numerous other souls struggling
against the anti-human beast (society) while charting out humanistic
horizons. Giants who create ever newer dimensions to life. Never lonely-ever alone.
Not only poets, but artists like Ernesto P. Martínez, Manuel G. Acosta,
Melicio "Mel" Casas, Carlos Rosas, Lydia Madrid, Matilde Zúniga, Zarco Guerrero, and
others also sting humanity with their adamant expression of human
liberation. The cascading music of Javier Pacheco and the fieriness of Alberto Baros-
such are the makings, the hechizos encantadores, of liberation.
The searing cry of Raúl Salinas in his "Trip Through the Mind jail," as he remembers his
sense of barrio/tierra: "i needed you then . . . identity . . . a sense of belonging . . ,
" as he realizes that modern Amerika means to devour any sense of identity; his
plight, like that of other Chicanos/Blacks/Indios (& even whites like Potts,
Ackley, & Dale McCollough), was/is one of realizing that being in modern amerika
is having to survive within the vacuousness of Howard Johnson, Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donut,
American Express-ways, & Sambo's. A world lacking earthiness and differences,
where people are programmatically assembled out to create more human dysfunctions....Even as this is being written, people are being violated by a callous political
machinery lusting for the vote and answerable only to the powerful. The barrios that
Salinas writes about-those now destroyed homes where love once
abounded in spite of poverty-are mostly gone now; in their stead are superfreeways
and neon monstrosities where more and more people lose their touch with human
reality as they further socialize their feelings to conform with security.Still, Chicanos and other minority people seethe with anger/ frustration,
and the call for protest continues fomenting, seeking that spark that will make it
blaze from one end of the country to the other. The idea of liberation and revolutionary
transformation of the world cannot any longer be silenced. This is still a violent world,
and people are still enslaved; Lalo still protests a "stupid amerika" for
castigating those born differently and relagating talent and hope to a dust bin;
José Montoya still feels the fields and sweat of his past and the anguish
of his parents; Sylvia Gonzáles continues striving to create sense out of the
senseless officiousness of power bases to return that power to the people; Lydia Madrid
paints the processes our people must survive; Tomás Atencio and La Academia de la Nueva
Raza lurk, dodge/weave, lash out, and continue to write/think/express reason and means
to create change; Carlos Rosas and Ernesto P. Martínez and Mel Casas and Manuel Acosta,
through their artist-eyes, project feeling and linkage to the universe-for art is a
political statement that affirms humankind's right to liberation and asserts one's personal
& collective responsibility to free oneself and one's people from any and/or all forms of
tyranny at whatever the cost; and our youth/older people are still feeling/thinking/dialoguing in
barrios/campos/colleges/armed services-wherever we exist-about the need for change, justice,
dignity, liberation, and peace. The wanton murder of Santos Rodríguez, eleven year old child
shot while handcuffed by a Dallas cop, the ruthless abuse of our people as they are
psychically violated by Amerika-the-hurt-in-full, and all the other sordid
actions/reactions of a nixonian world buttress our assertions that future generations must
and shall not feel the social lashings we have felt.No longer content to believe that it is right to suffer, that it is god's will that we
shoulder up to dispossession and accept oppression-strong questions are being asked and
righteous answers are being sought. Having realized that one is born to live that
institutions should serve (rather than be served!), and that one's life is defined in terms
of how one has existed, again are people committing themselves to struggle for liberation.
Having tasted the heartiness of community involvement and protest, having declared our
right to being free-we can no longer accept a world of expediency, exploitation,
political manipulation, and moral cowardice.el vuelo de la mente is an affirmation that being human merely means fighting for more than just the barest of social needs; it means not bowing nor feeling less than all I could be....This book is a series of glimpses at a multifaceted world; seething with anger and discontent;
pulsing with love and hope; and inspired by the humanity of those who have shared
moments with me. The barrios of my past still live on, if only in the imagery coursing
through my mind. The jadedness of prison and the callousness of tormented
tourist-trapping streets in North Beach, Ciudad Juárez, Hollywood, Times Square, and the
French Quarter still shrill out dehumanization-lustfully and sordidly, just as the political
beast we call society still shreds up our humanity in order to exploit us. Each new
word/phrase/thought/idea/feeling further define(s) the enemy. Clarity and coherence
are further delineated with each experience, and society and its strictures become even
more fearful-for their incessant demands that I conform, that everyone become even more
linear and obedient to hierarchical dictates.Thoughts/ideas/poetry/fiction/truth & fact, all these form the inner world(s) I inhabit.
These also are the structure of this book. Brief llantos and Iloridos and locuras and
looks at a process . . . un proceso vital that has matter-of-factly known the anomie of
prison/army, the desolation of poverty, the love of family, the
scorching/soothing/tenderness/strength/fulfillment of woman, the pungency of tierra-redolent
earth and brown earth and yellow earth and verdant earth-and the soulfulness of being
within the multidimensions of life.suero del haber podido vivir, each moment an affirmation, each moment either a caress or a hurting slap, realizing that to live is to feel, to share, to dream, to know life with pungency, whether it be your woman's aroma frothing out your body's warm enclaves or your voice creating new visions, or lush earth or dynamic ideas or un amigo sharing vino y queso or familia enrapturing the moment, or merely singing/shouting an adamant affirmation that to live is to have liberation....© Copyright 1976 by Ricardo Sánchez
